Author: jialynnh

The HPV vaccine has been around since 2006, and one must get 3 doses in order to be effective against the cancer causing types of HPV. Although many people claim that there are problems with the vaccine, and in Denmark the rates have tumbled down, I do think that it is still important to be protected against everything. Almost 80 million women have gotten the vaccine, and only few have developed neurological disorders as a result. It is important to recognize that the benefits far outweigh the risks of this. A very slim chance of getting a neurological disorder versus enhanced protection against cancer? I’d much take the latter.

Studies have now shown that just a single dose of the vaccine can be effective against HPV. More than 600,000 people get HPV related cancers per year when it can easily be prevented by getting the vaccine. I know that a lot of people are against vaccines, but when it’s between that and cancer, why wouldn’t you get the vaccine? Up to 15% of cancer cases each year are preventable. Cancer is such a scary thing, and yet we do not do the one thing that increases our chances of preventing the disease. This is the one thing we as humans can do, and yet so many choose not to.

There were many flaws in the clinical trials, such as researchers disregarding side effects they did not consider strong enough and failing to check up on participants. However, out of the thousands that participated, only a few developed neurological disorders. While their lives are forever affected by this, so many others have not experienced anything. I do think though that researchers need to be more considerate of their participants, especially when it is women and instead of just going with depression or anxiety actually look into their conditions. The HPV vaccine may have negatively affected their life, but it has brought so much more benefits to millions of others.

As we continuously misuse antibiotics, the problem of antibiotic resistance increasingly gets worse. These are wonderful things naturally created by bacteria themselves, and we have chosen to destroy the only thing that can help us fight off bacterial infections. Great job society! Many times we think about the problems of antibiotic resistance in humans, but we have not really considered antibiotic resistance in animals and plants. These are the very foods we eat, and can have a huge influence on us and the planet. As bacteria grow resistance, it has a huge impact on our crops, the planet, and us.

Since farmers overuse antibiotics in raising animals, it creates a problem that perhaps one day these resistant bacteria could take place in people. However, the more pressing issue currently is that there are less ways to treat an animal if they get sick due to increasing resistance. Antibiotics are added to animal feed not to treat but to prevent infections. However my thing is why are you giving them medicine that they don’t need in the first place? If the animals are not sick and yet you keep giving them antibiotics, that just creates grounds for antibiotic resistant bacteria to multiply. Much of our livelihood depends on these animals, and if they become sick then that will cause a worldwide food shortage. If our food sources goes, so do we. We have to start looking for better alternatives if we want this planet to stay healthy.

The use of antibiotics is changing the soil and plants as well. Plants that receive manure from animals do not convert carbon dioxide as well, which has devastating consequences for climate change. The manure comes from animals that received antibiotics, and thus the plants released more carbon dioxide than taking in. This in turn releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is causing global warming. Nature provided us with a solution to greenhouse gases, and we decided to mess up that process. If we do not make changes soon in the farming industry, antibiotic resistance could lead to food shortage and too high amounts of carbon dioxide, irreversibly.

The measles vaccine was invented in 1963 and YET we still have outbreaks occurring today. I truly do not understand why parents refuse to protect their children from an illness that can lead to lifelong complications. The vaccine is usually given as part of MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) , and consists of 2 doses. It is made of live attenuated viruses so they do not cause disease but allow the body to develop an immune response should the virus occur again in the future. By using vaccines, we can get artificially acquired active immunity, protecting against future infections without having to suffer through the first one.

A study has shown that a third of all reported measles cases have complications such as pneumonia, hepatitis and viral meningitis. Meningitis is literally inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, which sounds extremely painful. I don’t understand why a parent would choose to put their child through that when they could just…get the vaccine. This could lead to lifelong neurological problems that could have easily been prevented had they just vaccinated their children. Also pneumonia can cause death in people with weakened immune systems and children go around touching everything. You don’t realize who they can infect, and what those consequences could be. There is much more at stake than we realize.

Measles also suppresses the immune system, which can cause severe complications in all organs of the body. The scariest thing is that it can cause SSPE, a progressive neurological disorder that causes permanent nerve damage. It eventually leads to a vegetative state. Is this really a risk that you are willing to take? I would certainly take the much lower risk of getting a vaccine than some life threatening conditions that can easily be prevented. I think people do not realize that getting one disease makes you more susceptible to others, and can lead to death. Just save your child the pain and suffering and vaccinate them.

Polio in the US seems like such an illness of the past, something that is not even relevant in our minds today. Vaccines have done such a good job of erasing the horrors that polio does to one’s body that most people have no recollection of what it even looks like. However, this is not the case in many other parts of the world, the countries Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria, where polio is still endemic. Polio wreaks havoc on the body, paralyzing the respiratory muscles so that one can no longer breathe on their own. The iron lung seems a thing of the past, but it very much still impacts people in those 3 countries today.

The polio vaccine was first developed in the mid 1950s, which consisted of inactivated virus particles, called IPV. This lowered the rate of disease but required a series of injections for maximum protection against the virus. Then in 1961, the OPV vaccine became available, consisting of attenuated strains. It was much cheaper to administer, but the attenuated viruses could mutate to become virulent. However, it had an advantage over the IPV, inducing better mucosal immunity and preventing the virus from being transmitted in feces. Despite the risk of it becoming virulent, it is only one case in every 2.4 million doses and can protect against being transmitted in a population. Thus, it serves much better as a vaccine in preventing the spread of polio.

Now lets talk about occurrences in Nigeria and Pakistan. In Nigeria there is a campaign to vaccinate all children in the country, as children are more vulnerable to infection. They are given the OPV vaccine, and I think it’s a good thing that people are willing to get vaccines for their children. They realize the bigger risk here, which is polio and want to protect their children. In my opinion, it is important to realize that the biggest threat is not the vaccine itself, it’s the disease that it prevents. However, not everyone in Pakistan realizes this. Recently, a Pakistan officer assigned to escort a polio vaccination team was killed. Attacks like this occur quite frequently in Pakistan, and health workers are often victims of attack too. The Taliban has painted vaccines as an Western campaign trying to sterilize children, and people live in fear of these vaccines. Health workers just trying to do their jobs risk death every day. This kind of misinformation is what is killing children, not vaccines.

Again going back to my main point, vaccinate your children!! I think it’s so ridiculous that some parents would rather their kids die than MAYBE have autism. Make it make sense. A lot of these parents are worried about all these side effects when honestly it’s the diseases themselves that are horrifying. Polio can cause paralysis, and measles in rare cases can lead to encephalitis, and HPV causes 90% of cervical cancers. These can all be easily prevented by a vaccine, but people are more concerned about “possibly” getting autism. The effects of these diseases can be devastating, but that’s not the side that people choose to see.

An article by The New York Times explains it very well, saying that parents had never seen these diseases because they’ve been eliminated, but they thought they knew autism. In their minds, autism was the worst thing that could happen to their children. To them, the biggest risk isn’t life threatening illnesses but autism. They would much rather have the choice to vaccinate their child than possibly subject their child to autism. The thing is, it isn’t just about your child here. This is about people who are immunocompromised, who can’t just fight off these illnesses. We have to protect them, because a cold to us could mean death for them. But people are very selfish, and will always put their fear ahead of others.

An interesting case is happening in Denmark, where HPV vaccine rates dropped by 50.4% between 2013-2016 due to misinformation. Today, despite the government’s efforts, close to 26,000 females are not vaccinated. This could lead to 180 cases of cervical cancer and 45 deaths which could be avoided simply by getting a vaccine. I just don’t understand why you would subject your child to such painful illnesses when they could get a vaccine and be protected from infection for life and never have to suffer such pain. Maybe we have to bring back the images of those who suffer from these eradicated illnesses to remind people that the vaccines save lives.

The microbiome is an amazing, ever changing community that lives right alongside us, yet we never noticed until now. It is what helps us to function, and protects us against infections that otherwise would be deadly to us. There has been a huge increase in research involving the microbiome in the past few years, but much of it still remains unsolved. In this weeks blog, I am looking at two different parts of the body’s microbiota, the lungs and gut. These bacteria can help determine medical treatment and how the body functions.

One study showed that gut bacteria affects how the colon moves. This in turn affects digestion, which is a process that is essential to our health. Without it, we would not be able to get all the nutrients that we need to survive. These bacteria are also key in maintaining bowel movement and ensuring that chronic inflammation does not occur. If the bacteria gets off-kilter, it can cause long term digestion problems that are not easy to fix, and can be very painful to manage. It’s crazy to think that such small organisms play such a big role in our daily lives, and ensure that we can function properly. Even the colon, which is a muscle that once was thought to be controlled by the brain, relies heavily on the presence of good bacteria in order to function.

Another study looked into how the lung microbiome affected how patients responded to treatment. It found that patients with a higher amount of bacteria did not respond as well to treatment and had to spend more days in the ICU. Bacteria that was normally found in the gut caused problems to worsen when they were in the lungs. Those who had pneumonia had a higher percentage of bacteria, which makes sense because pneumonia is caused by bacteria. It’s very interesting to me because we usually think of lungs as sterile places, but they actually contain a diverse community of bacteria that can easily be thrown off. Research in the future could look into how the presence of these bacteria affects responses to medication, and develop better treatment for diseases. The microbiome is truly a diverse and fascinating place of study.

The flu is something that occurs every year, and yet something most of us never think about. We simply get our flu shot and move on with our lives. In reality, the flu can wreak havoc on people’s lives. For this flu season, there have been 22 million cases, with 210,000 hospitalizations and 12,000 deaths in the USA. That is an extremely high number, yet most of us pay no mind to the flu, with some even going as far as refusing to get the vaccine. However, the vaccine does not necessarily ensure that you will not get the flu. Some years, the predictions are incorrect and the vaccines can only offer partial protection, as seen in this years flu season.

According to officials, there was a significantly higher number of cases of influenza B than normal. Usually, influenza B is seen later in flu season and is not as predominate as influenza A. However, in Louisiana, there were 1200 cases of influenza B between July 31 and November 21 of 2019, which is very unusual. Children are more vulnerable to influenza B, but that does not mean that they should get their flu vaccines. Some studies showed that those vaccinated had better protection against other influenza B subgroups, despite the fact that the strains are not exact matches.

This is a problem largely because such a high rate of influenza B cases have not been seen in many years. When designing the flu vaccine for the year, WHO officials were more concerned with choosing the proper influenza A virus strain than the B. They ultimately chose H3N2 for influenza A but that was also shown to be very ineffective, causing much concern and worry. However, I again make the point that some protection is less than none, that if you get the vaccine, then at least if you do get the flu you are more prepared to fight if off. Despite the fact that the strains are different, your body might have enough similar antibodies to begin fighting off infection so that you won’t die from the flu.

Bill Gates was right in 2015 when he said the biggest threat facing our world today is microbes, especially viruses. He said back then that we would not be ready for the next epidemic, and he was right. This new outbreak shows that despite all the various outbreaks we’ve had over the past years, there still is no system in place. Whenever something breaks out, it’s always a scramble of catching up to the virus instead of having all the preparations. Many of the serious outbreaks in the past decade like SARS in 2003, MERS in 2012, and Ebola in 2014 are all caused by viruses. With this track record, one would think the world would have been better prepared for the next outbreak. Yet, we were caught off guard.

The coronavirus outbreak began in Wuhan, China and is new, which is why it has been such a frantic time. It has not been identified before, and thus there is no treatment or cure. Of course, the Chinese government has also played a part in why this has escalated so much. A doctor tried to get out the warning at the end of December, and was harassed by the government for doing so. Other medical workers who tried to sound the alarms were quickly silenced, and the residents of Wuhan were never notified of anything. The government refused to acknowledge any rumors of an outbreak and said that the situation was under control and that the virus did not spread from human to human. By December 25, doctors already heard that the virus was already spreading among medical workers, yet it would be 3 weeks until any public warning would be issued. Only on January 20 did the government for the first time acknowledge the full scale of the virus. In the next few days the death toll had jumped from 3 to 200.

The utter lack of responsibility at the top level led to this catastrophic chain of events. This virus could have been more easily prevented had they acknowledged the warning signs at the beginning and isolated patients and those they came in contact with. Before, it was only people who worked at the market who had gotten ill; now it was a large part of a city of 11 million people. With a population that large, it is so much harder to control travel and that allowed those infected to travel abroad, creating a world wide epidemic. Now, scientists have to hurry to catch up with the virus, instead of having prepared for it at the very beginning. Only time will tell how this story will proceed.

Update:

The doctor, Li Wenliang, who tried to get out the early warning about the coronavirus is now dead. He was forced to sign a statement from the police saying he would stop his illegal activity, and continued seeing patients, one who was infected with coronavirus. His death has caused an outpouring of anger and grief on social media, one perhaps the government did not expect. A hashtag demanding freedom of speech trended for 5 hours before being taken down by the government, an unusually slow response for China. If perhaps the officials had listened to him, the situation would not have escalated to this point.

Now, officials are demanding a roundup of all infected patients with coronavirus and placing them in hospitals or quarantine camps. The language seems like sending them to a death camp, as an official says “Set up a 24-hour duty system. During these wartime conditions, there must be no deserters, or they will be nailed to the pillar of historical shame forever” (Sun Chunlan). However, these so called camps seem more like places people are being sent to die, as beds are placed in close quarters together and there is a shortage in staff and medical supplies. People don’t even have sufficient electricity to keep warm throughout the night. If their bodies cannot be kept comfortable so that their immune systems can fight off the virus, how can we expect these people to be able to survive? This is why so many people are calling it death camps.

Wuhan has a much higher fatality rate (4.1) compared to the rest of China (0.17). The lock-down has affected some 50 million people, and honestly the ethics of all this is pretty questionable. Essentially isolating millions of people and leaving them to die is what the CCP is doing. The medical staff lack proper supplies and gear, and many themselves have come down with the virus. Those being rounded up to quarantine camps are not given proper care or treatment, all while the government officials sit comfortably in their homes and Xi Jinping himself takes a step back so that the blame cannot all be laid on him. The Chinese government could have been able to contain all of this earlier if they had listened to medical professionals instead of trying to maintain China’s image.

Honestly it’s kind of shocking to me that such a terribly conducted study could have had such a worldwide impact. Wakefield had a sample size of 12 children aged 3-9, and 11 of those children were male. That is not a representative population in any way, and the children had all been referred to him for gastroenterology issues, which is what he specialized in, not autism research. None of his “research” has been verified by other scientists and yet parents still will not vaccinate their children. Many studies have been conducted and not a single one has determined any sort of connection between vaccines causing autism. His study had no control and the results were heavily skewed, yet no one said anything.

It was later found out also that Wakefield had a serious conflict of interest; he was being funded by lawyers suing MMR vaccine makers. He had a financial incentive to skew his results to show that vaccines were bad and claim his sample was representative. There was also a huge ethical concern with this study as many tests performed on the children were highly invasive, unnecessary, and performed without consent. Yet for some reason, no one blocked the study from being published in the first place. It was definitely questioned after being published, but how was it even allowed with all these glaring issues?

Thanks to this unscientific study, it caused a global panic as parents began to not vaccinate their children out of fear. It just seems ridiculous to me that one would rather their child have a severe illness and possibly die rather than have autism. In recent years, measles outbreaks have been on the rise in Western countries despite the fact that it was almost eradicated in the 1990s. Last year, there were 1282 cases of measles reported to the CDC in America. This is the highest number since 1992, and as the graph shows the trend of parents not vaccinating their children due to the anti vaccine hysteria is on the rise. It’s an extreme concern because measles spreads very fast, and the less people who are vaccinated, the easier it is for immunocompromised people to get measles and come down with serious illnesses. Vaccination is not just about protecting yourself against disease, it is also about protecting those who cannot get vaccinated due to health reasons. It is not just about yourself here, there is a bigger picture at risk that people cannot see. Vaccines save lives and in no way are connected with autism. Please do your research people!

These days I imagine my future to be this: me, a financially stable independent woman living in an apartment with her 5 cats. I love cats and really wish I could have one but unfortunately my mom is afraid of animals. So this dream will have to be put on hold for a while.

My name is Jialynn Huang and I am currently studying at UNC with no life direction. My mom wants me to do nursing, but I honestly have no idea what I want to do. I’m just drifting through life, guided only by my biology degree requirements.

Ah yes, to explain my blog title…well I love fluffy things, and the first thing that popped into my mind was fluffy cows, which was an internet phenomenon a while back. It makes me happy to look at pictures of fluffy animals. I watch cat videos in my free time, as well as watching Disney movies and eating massive amounts of chocolate. Chocolate is my favorite food, it is something I can keep eating forever and never get tired of.

I am very passionate about many issues, mostly advocating for the rights of oppressed groups and social justice. Oh and I also have scoliosis and had spinal fusion surgery 6 years ago. My spine was in an S shape, the upper curve was 35 degrees and the lower curve 45 degrees. Needless to say, it was not a fun time for any of us. These days, I still experience muscle pain a lot. Spring is a very difficult time for me as the metal in my spine will expand and shrink due to the crazy temperature changes. Some days I wake up and cannot move, and then have to spend my time drafting emails explaining my tragic absence. I deal as best I can, but this pain will never go away.

Anyways this was a very long and terribly worded introduction, but I hope you know a little more about me and this was at least interesting to read. Have a lovely day!